10/07/09 – Adam Kokesh – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome to the show Adam Kokash.
He's running for Congress as a Republican, but he claims to be antiwar.
I guess we'll see.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me on.
Let me tell you here.
Oh, first of all, thank you very much for coming on.
I'm happy to have you here.
I completely failed the first half hour of this show today.
I tried for at least 20, 25 minutes to convince the head of Code Pink, the co-founder of Code Pink, to support immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan.
And I wonder, what was it that I didn't say?
What was bad about my argument?
What was it that she needed to hear to understand that we should have left Afghanistan a long time ago and we, meaning the U.S. military, needs to leave there right now, Adam?
Wow.
Was this Medea?
Afraid so.
Wow.
And she's not supporting immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The real point is, why wasn't I able to convince her?
What's the right argument?
What is the right argument, Adam?
You know, I'm really shocked to actually hear that about Medea, because it was one of the things that I really have appreciated.
And I have, you know, run into members of Code Pink and spent time with them in D.C. when I was living and working there with the Iraq veterans against the war.
And a lot of them were really, really truly principled on the concept of non-interventionism, that the military solution is never the moral one.
And I'm really shocked to hear that.
But, you know, it was great to have a chance to talk philosophy with some of those ladies at one of their potlucks in D.C.
And for all the people that got involved in the anti-war movement, because they see what our foreign policy is, they see the kind of pain and suffering that it leads to, and see something and they want to get involved, and then they end up with a group that has more of a left-leaning slant, that it depends on violence and force of government to solve problems outside of our foreign policy, rather than inside of the country and our domestic policy.
It was great to be able to talk philosophy with them, and a lot of them were really, really open to that libertarian position, the idea from the philosophical axiom that aggressive use of force is morally wrong.
And I was able to get really far, you know, coming from that point.
I don't know, did you try that angle?
No, we didn't do the non-aggression.
Well, I mean, there was a distinction in there somewhere between Iraq and Afghanistan, in that somehow there was at least perceived to be a legitimate excuse to invade Afghanistan in the first place.
But then when I brought up that that was no longer valid, which I would have thought rendered it the same argument as the Iraq argument, I don't quite remember what her answer was, but it wasn't.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I don't know, I mean, and this is the thing too, especially if you're running as a Republican, you've got to really be able to say, listen, we've got to get out of Afghanistan for the following reasons, and go until they're done listening, right?
Yeah, well, you know what, there's something that I've learned from my experience with the anti-war movement, and sort of where they are right now in relationship to President Obama, that's really, really sad, is that once you vote for somebody or get behind them or support them, as a candidate, it's hard afterwards to say, oh, you know what, I was wrong, oh, I screwed up, I shouldn't have supported him knowing that he was going to have this kind of foreign policy and continue these kind of wars of aggression and continue the kind of suffering and pain associated with our interventionist foreign policy.
And that's kind of, there's an interesting psychological process there, going through most of the anti-war movement leadership.
And first, there's kind of a disbelief, like, wait a second, wait a second, I thought Obama was a peace candidate.
And then there's a great reluctance, and then there's a denial, like, well, I guess he still is, but this is different, you know, and it has to be different because it's Obama, and he's a good guy, and he wouldn't, you know, he would never do anything to lead us astray, right?
And then you get, then there's kind of a frustration in going, well, wait a second, you know, it's almost like the six stages of grief that you go through, and the six stages of disillusionment when, oh, crap, you know, I thought I was supporting an anti-war president, and I was wrong.
And there's a lot of reluctance there, and there's a lot of rationalization, well, he's got to be better than Bush, and he's got to be better than McCain.
Well, you know what, it doesn't matter, because if you're standing on principle, you have to recognize that he's still just as wrong, just as criminally liable, and just as morally reprehensible as any other U.S. president who started or continued a war that was not justified.
All right, pardon me for being jerky, but I didn't get much sleep last night.
I like what you say, but you still ain't answering my question.
What did you do wrong?
No, well, I want to know what you would have said instead.
What's your argument?
How do you win your argument that we've got to end this war, man?
I'm sorry for not being clear.
It probably is more my fault than yours here.
No, no, it's all right, it's all right.
In the case of Afghanistan, the argument that I've been using that I really like here in New Mexico and running for Congress, especially in working within the Republican Party, calling them back to their roots, calling them back to core principles, many of them are deeply in touch with the political connection and their Christian values.
And so I like to use Christian justice for that.
Well, of course, the Republican Party was founded in war.
Which principles are we getting back to now?
That's definitely up for debate.
But a lot of the Republicans here are devout Christians, or at least claim to be.
And so reminding them of Christian just war theory and what the values represented there are is what I like to start with.
And the first principle of the Christian just war theory is that wars can only be fought in self-defense, must be declared by a legitimate authority.
Most importantly in the case of Afghanistan is it must be proportionate to the threat.
And in the case of being in self-defense, we were not ever, by any stretch of the imagination, attacked by the Taliban itself or the people of Afghanistan.
And that's who we're fighting against now with this occupation, with our presence in Afghanistan.
And so I like to go to that and say, well, you know, this really doesn't represent our values, this really doesn't represent anything moral.
And to say that we're there to repeat the propaganda of the Obama administration is just as wrong as repeating the propaganda of the Bush administration.
And it's all used to justify another military adventure, another scam, as Smedley Butler put it, you know, war is a racket in which the few profit and the many pay.
It's as true today as it was when he said it after World War I.
And we see the same exact thing happen in Afghanistan.
It's really sad for me to hear that members of the anti-war movement, people who are really have been committed to this cause, who have done so much great work for this cause like Medea, are now turning to that and supporting military solutions.
So, you know, that's the approach I would have taken.
I don't know if that would have worked for Medea.
Maybe for her I might have gone more to the philosophical non-aggression actions.
I think with people who are reflectively anti-war, because they see the suffering associated with it, those seem to have a good effect.
And I like to go to that argument.
Well, now, what about the conservatives?
Obviously you tell them, hey, I'm a veteran, so I know of what I speak.
So at least they've got to give you a break and listen to you for a minute, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And after Christian just war theory, the next thing for me is, well, what is nation building?
You know, this is a liberal concept that, you know, even though we have these big government institutions here in the United States that are theoretically designed to accomplish their stated objectives that fail so miserably, somehow, despite that reality, we can take the U.S. military, which is the best in the world at blowing things up and killing people, we can put it on the other side of the world and have it create big government institutions, and that's somehow going to work for people that we don't even understand, because they're not Americans.
They come from a totally different religious and value-based system than ours.
And this liberal concept of nation building can only come with the arrogance of someone who thinks that their use of aggressive force is somehow morally right or that they can have a moral authority to dictate what people are doing on the other side of the world.
And that usually gets through to them.
When they associate occupation and what we're doing over there with big government, they go, oh, yeah, that's not really conservative, is it?
Yeah, well, see, I guess I'm worried that people who hadn't figured this out after eight years of it, or obviously more than that, but just even the last eight years of it, as long as it was Republicans who were doing it, and even now they don't get it.
Until they hear it from you, they mostly attack a lot of people on the right, of course attack Obama for being some kind of peacenik, you know, Muslim traitor to the real war against Islamofascism and whatever is where a lot of that's coming to, which is, I think, important because this is what you're up against, right?
This is the primary you're going to have to win.
This is the base you're going to have to rally their support from in order to beat the Democrat in your district there in New Mexico.
And in order to do that, you're going to have to appeal, you're going to use just war theory to appeal to people who've abandoned religion, who've abandoned the Constitution, any semblance of the rule of law, of federalism, of private property rights, all so that they can support and cheerlead for torture and for unlimited warfare.
And they've had a history of eight years of demanding torture.
Now, how the hell are you going to get people like that to make you their leader in the Republican Party?
Adam, seriously.
I've got to say, I really think you're not being fair to the Republican grassroots, and there is a huge disconnect, and I'm really learning this as I get around the district here.
There is a huge disconnect between the grassroots Republicans and the national leadership.
Now, I think a lot of what you're saying is based on a false assumption that we as activists, the people who are politically engaged professionally or for whatever personal passions we have, tend to make a lot, and that is assuming that the average American is paying attention at least half a percent as much as we are, and the fact is they're not.
And that gets to a bigger problem with general political engagement in this country that I'm really excited to be working on and helping out with as I get around and get people inspired to be more engaged and involved.
But these people haven't abandoned those values.
They haven't abandoned those principles of the Constitution.
They just need to be reminded of them and be reminded to question and say, hey, you know what, it's not American to repeat propaganda.
It's not American to obey without question.
It's not American to simply go along to get along.
And when you wake them up, you give them just a little bit of a shake there, a lot of them really get reengaged, and a big part of my campaign here is simply, you know, continuing to honor my oath to the Constitution, and they really get that.
Even if they disagree with me on certain points, even if we can't get through to them completely on the war issue, they would much rather have an honest, principled, constitutionalist Republican such as myself than a Democrat as we have now representing this district who is a total hypocrite, who has said that, you know, in what is all too typical form for Democrats in Congress these days, you know, what he's done is he went and voted for the war funding and then turned around and said, well, we're going to demand some kind of exit strategy.
And it's this kind of posturing that people are starting to see through and really get.
And by simply being consistent in representing the values that I represent, people appreciate that, and it's waking them up and it's getting them back in touch with their own core values, and that's really exciting.
All right.
Now, what's your position on American forces throughout the world?
There's, at least according to the latest count from the best journalists I know, David Vine, the author of Island of Shame, about Diego Garcia, he says there are more than 1,000 American military bases in other people's countries on this planet.
What's your policy as a congressional candidate here?
I think we need to bring them all home.
Absolutely.
And I think that's something that can be done, you know, through congressional action.
But more importantly, we need to reconsider our principles and what is the role of the U.S. military and the Department of Defense.
And what I'd really like to see is a complete restructuring of the U.S. military.
And I'm not proposing anything immediate or drastic, but at least I want to get the discussion going and get people started thinking on this level, because our founders warned us about the dangers of a standing army, and that's what we have.
What I'd like to see us do is bring the troops home and transition to a more reserve-based system where we have, you know, the Navy and Air Force and maybe Marine Corps attachments are a larger proportion of the military, and the standing army part, you know, goes away.
We have more of a basis in reserves and really make sure that our mission is always defense, not policing the world or managing crises or humanitarian interventionism or, you know, fighting terrorism through occupation, which is an absurd idea where we're obviously, as I learned from my experience, we're making enemies faster than we can kill them, and that needs to stop.
All right, well, so now let me make like National Review and say, yeah, yeah, naivete and dangerous world and dangerous foreign countries and Islamofascist terrorism, and you're an isolationist and you really just don't know what you're talking about.
The world you describe, where America doesn't occupy the world, is a world where the rest of the world itself is perpetually at war against poor defenseless us.
You know, it's really sad that we have to step back when we get questions like that and explain the difference between isolationism and non-interventionism, and just be really clear, non-interventionism means we're not going out with our military, we're not aggressively using force, whereas isolationism is our corporations, our private citizens, people who can engage in trade are isolated and kept from engaging internationally, but what our founders advised was a foreign policy of friendship, free trade, commerce, engagement of that nature with all nations and entangling alliances with none.
I really stand by that.
I think that's the only kind of foreign policy that reflects those values.
And so when you get a question like that, you have to wonder, is the person asking this deliberately putting forth this kind of propaganda or furthering this, or do they really want to know the difference?
Because for most people, when you break it down like that, they go, oh, so that's what you mean, and it's really a simple matter of education, and it cuts right through it.
But unfortunately, as you know, we have a military-industrial complex, we have a system of corporatism that exerts an incredible amount of influence and control, not just over our government, but over the channels of communication, the media in our society, and that leads to a lot of misinformation, deliberate miseducation, spreading of propaganda that furthers this kind of myth that if the U.S. doesn't have its military all over the world, that it's all going to fall apart.
And it really reflects either propaganda designed for profit and for a select few who benefit from war and that kind of interventionism, but it also reflects and I think propagates what's much more dangerous, is a really kind of distorted American exceptionalism based on an arrogance that really distorts a lot of average Americans' view of the world and America's place in it, because they're not given an honest look at international affairs today.
Tell me about Iraq.
Well, when I got back from Iraq, people would ask me on the way to class, and I was a reservist, I went back to college, and I went to class the day I got off the bus at Camp Pendleton, which was a horrible idea, but people would say, so how was Iraq?
And the only answer I could say, I was like, I'm on my way to class here.
You really want me to sum up the most intense experience of my life in five minutes?
Give me a break.
So I would just say hot, dirty, and dangerous.
Yeah, no, I want you to talk about it for about ten minutes.
Ten minutes, all right.
Well, you know, again, applying the Christian just war theory, it's really easy to cut through the entire premise of this war, which is that we are going to preemptively go in and do something.
Any kind of preemption is morally wrong and goes against the principle of, you know, force is only appropriate in self-defense.
And so in Iraq, people see that, and it's amazing.
Even among conservatives and Republicans here in the district, there's a pretty good consensus that at least the war wasn't necessary, and they really accept that.
And when you say, well, what do we do now?
Doesn't the whole place fall apart if we leave?
I like to talk about rule of law, and this really cuts through it, because in the United States we have a rule of law that we really take for granted.
Now, it's not a good one, don't get me wrong, but laws don't change just sort of from day to day at the whim of our leadership, you know, without any kind of process.
At least we have something there.
And there's kind of an expectation that we understand there are certain rules governing interaction between fellow Americans that we all have a certain amount of respect for.
This is the foundation of a social fabric that holds us together.
Now, I'm not endorsing the system that we have now, but at least we have a semblance of a rule of law that allows for, you know, interaction between people, allows for trade and commerce and productivity and generation of wealth and prosperity, as we see being threatened today in the U.S. economy because of the uncertainty of the intervention of the U.S. government in our own economy.
Well, in Iraq, it's a lot worse, and this is what's really preventing the people of Iraq from putting their own country back together, is being able to establish that rule of law.
And our presence there as a military is the imposition of martial law, where rules change from day to day, from area to area, at the whim of U.S. military commanders.
And we see in the United States, who wants to invest in something when there's so much uncertainty caused by the government?
Well, we see that our government has a certain degree of intervention in the U.S. economy.
Well, imagine the effect magnified by a multitude in Iraq and the kind of uncertainty that prevents the things that we take for granted here that are possible in our economy, like investment and cooperation.
I mean, simply hiring people and expecting them to be reliable employees.
You just don't have that in Iraq, where you still have a system that is more based on martial law than a rule of law generated by the Iraqis in a system that reflects their values and allows them to develop their...
Yeah, but I mean, is it a fair prediction that Nouri al-Maliki and the Dawah Party and whoever he's got political alliances with, Muqtada al-Sadr, or some of Saddam Hussein's former generals, that these guys are going to come up with a rule of law for Iraq?
And isn't it then the obligation, under your premise there, that we have to stay even, you know, like now, kind of got all the troops back mostly, withdrawn to their bases, limited missions, and we have to stay to guarantee that they have a rule of law before we go, or else all the guys who died fighting in the war, never mind any of the Iraqis who died, because that never seems to count in the equation, but all the American soldiers who died in the war, 4,300 plus or so, will have died in vain.
The mission will be a failure if we do it your way.
Ooh, don't go there, man.
Listen, you're running for Congress.
If that's the verse you've got to put up with in an interview, you're in real trouble, dude.
I'm just going to say, let me take that one on first, because that really hits home.
When you say that the troops there died in vain, you know what?
If you put your fingers into a lawnmower and you lose a couple of fingers and you made a mistake, would you ever in your right mind say, oh, well, now I've got to put my arm in up to the elbow so that I didn't lose my fingers in vain?
You don't want to think that we're just going to have to lose more troops and we're going to have to put more Americans in harm's way because they died in vain argument?
That is so absurd.
I know that's not coming from you personally, but I hear that, and that really does get me somewhere.
That really evokes a certain passion in me because I saw friends die in Iraq, and I know that they died because of lies.
I know that they died not doing anything that made the United States safer, and they died for the best of intentions for themselves, and they died for what they believed was a noble cause, and that deserves to be respected.
But to say that because they died because of a mistake, we have to send more troops to die for a mistake is absurd.
But back to the premise of the question about the representation that we see in the leadership of Iraq right now, well, all of that is contingent upon the influence of the U.S. government and the U.S. military.
So to think that Maliki or anybody else in any kind of position of leadership in Iraq is a good representation of the will of the Iraqi people is absurd.
And to think that the elections there were uninfluenced by the United States, of course, is a joke.
Or even that the people that were elected aren't free of American influence is ridiculous.
So part of the concept of non-interventionism is more than just taking our military back to the bases or even back to the United States, but really not using our power that we have through our military, through being able to bully other countries in a certain action or to bribe them.
I mean, you know, it's been our foreign policy since World War II, the bomb or the bribe.
And all of those interventions and internal affairs of other countries inevitably lead to bad governance and more human suffering and poor representation and the kind of stuff that you see going on there.
So I'm in no way saying that our immediate withdrawal will lead to rule of law happening immediately because the Iraqis have such a great system of government in place, but that it will create the space in which they can do that for themselves.
And that process is going to take as long as it takes them.
I mean, after the American War for Independence, it took us a while before we had a constitution ratified and had some kind of rule of law established for ourselves there.
So you can't expect that to happen immediately, and I don't either.
But what we can immediately do is get out of the way of that process and allow it to happen naturally for the Iraqi people by the Iraqi people.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Adam Kokesh.
I know you're a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace.
You obviously talk a pretty good game.
You're a natural anti-war leader, according to all the kiddos on Facebook, at least.
No doubt about that.
So why do you want to run for Congress?
I mean, let's not pretend and be naive here and whatever.
If you want to be a congressman, and particularly if you want to stay a congressman, you've got to compromise and you've got to end up turning into an evil person.
Just look at all 535 of them up there.
And so what's the point of that?
Because all of them think it would be worse if they weren't there, though, to do the things that they think are right.
All of them rationalize it that way to themselves.
What says you're going to be any different than them?
Seriously, you're going into politics here.
If I didn't think it was possible to win this one on principle, I wouldn't be doing it.
If I didn't think it was possible to hold that office without holding on to my integrity, I wouldn't be doing it.
And I've got to say, if I'm not in jail or we're halfway to revolution by the end of my first term, I'm probably not doing my job because that's what I'm in this for.
It's not about holding the office.
It's not about taking the power.
It's about the revolution that is happening in this country and doing everything I can to support it, be a part of it, and champion the philosophy behind it.
Because that revolution is a paradigm shift.
It is a revolution of values, a revolution of thought, and a revolution of approach to what government is in this country.
And I think that by my engagement in the political process and becoming a part of the system, I can carry this message into the belly of the beast.
I can make real change happen.
And if I can't, I'm going to die trying.
All right, everybody, that's Adam Kokesh.
Check out the website.
It's kokeshforcongress.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thanks, Scott.